1. Field
The present invention relates to techniques for enhancing the reliability of computer systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for synchronizing signals related to the operation of a computer system.
2. Related Art
Computer manufacturers often desire to characterize the operation of computer systems by measuring the relationship between various operational and performance parameters of the computer systems, including power usage, operating temperature and CPU utilization. Typically, this information is gathered using data acquisition devices that can have different sampling rates, and also may have clocks that are not synchronized. Therefore, the time stamps of signals from these sources may have lead-lag phase discrepancies resulting in difficulties in synchronizing the signals to achieve phase coherence among the separate data streams. This lack of phase coherence between data sources can make it difficult to generate synchronized relationships between the gathered data, such as would be desirable, for example, to generate a graph of computer power usage vs. CPU utilization.
Hence, what is needed is a method and apparatus for synchronizing signals related to the operation of a computer system without the above-described problems.